- Documentary Showing The Alarming Effects Of 30 Days Of
McDonald's Meals On Its Director Takes Sundance Festival By Storm
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- NEW YORK -- Normally sane
actors have been known to gain or lose huge amounts of weight for their
art. Think of Ren©e Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary. Directors,
of course, never have to undergo such torture. Or so it used to be, until
Morgan Spurlock had a bright idea for a film project.
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- The first clue to his particular misery comes in the
title of his documentary, which has become the darling of this year's Sundance
Film Festival. It is called Super Size Me: A Film of Epic Portions and
it is a sometimes comic but serious look at America's addiction to fast
food.
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- Spurlock, a 6ft 2in New Yorker of usually cast-iron constitution,
made himself the guinea pig in this dogged investigation into the effects
of fast food on the body. He ate only at McDonald's for a month - three
meals, every day - and took a camera crew along to record it. If a server
offered to super-size his order, he was obliged to accept - and to ingest
everything, gherkins and all.
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- Neither Spurlock, 33, nor the three doctors who agreed
to monitor his health during the experiment was prepared for the degree
of ruin it would wreak on his body. Within days, he was vomiting up his
burgers and battling with headaches and depression. And his sex drive vanished.
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- When Spurlock had finished, his liver, overwhelmed by
saturated fats, had virtually turned to p¢t©. "The liver
test was the most shocking thing," said Dr Daryl Isaacs, who joined
the team to watch over him. "It became very, very abnormal."
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- Spurlock put on 25lbs over the period and his cholesterol
level leapt from a respectable 165 to 230.
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- He told the New York Post: "I got desperately ill.
My face was splotchy and I had this huge gut, which I've never had in my
life ... It was amazing - and really frightening." And his girlfriend,
a vegan chef? "She was completely disgusted by me," he said.
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- Making the film over several months last year, Spurlock
travelled through 20 states, interviewing everyone from fast-food junkies
to the US Surgeon General and a lobbyist for the industry. McDonald's,
for whom the film can only be a public relations catastrophe, ignored his
repeated entreaties for comment.
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- Spurlock had the idea for the film on Thanksgiving Day
2002, slumped on his mother's couch after eating far too much. He saw a
news item about two teenage girls in New York suing McDonald's for making
them obese. The company responded by saying their food was nutritious and
good for people. Is that so, he wondered? To find out, he committed himself
to his 30 days of Big Mac bingeing.
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- The film does not yet have a distributor and, given the
advertising clout of McDonald's, that may prove problematic. But the critics
at Sundance seem to have been captivated. Certainly, the film is blessed
by good timing. Obesity has in recent months captured headlines as America's
new health scourge. The humour of the approach - and Spurlock's own suffering
- obviously helps.
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- At the festival in Park City, Utah, he has had teams
handing out "Unhappy Meal" bags on the streets with a few "Fat
Fun Facts". For instance, one in four Americans visits a fast-food
restaurant every day. And did you know that McDonald's feeds more people
around the world every day than the population of Spain? The makers have
self-rated the film "F" - for "fat audiences".
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- McDonald's has finally been forced to comment. "Consumers
can achieve balance in their daily dining decisions by choosing from our
array of quality offerings and range of portion sizes to meet their taste
and nutrition goals," it said in a statement last week.
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- Spurlock claims that the goal was not to attack McDonald's
as such. Among the issues he highlights is the willingness of schools to
feed students nothing but burgers and pizza. "If there's one thing
we could accomplish with the film, it is that we make people think about
what they put in their mouth," he said. "So the next time you
do go into a fast-food restaurant and they say, 'Would you like to upsize
that?' you think about it and say, 'Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll stick with
the medium this time.'"
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/news/story.jsp?story=484517
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